Earlier in the year, I thought my laptop was coming to the end of its life – painfully slow, sounded like a hairdryer as soon as it was turned on and got as hot as one too, and despite a couple of battery changes in the past, had got to the point again where I could only use it if it was plugged in (or for less than 5 minutes within dashing distance of the power supply).
A little bit of care in January including a new battery, new and increased amount of RAM and bit of a clean helped a lot, but now it’s even more like new!
My 9+ year old laptop is now sorted with a new (much quicker) solid state drive (SSD) to replace its increasingly slow hard drive and though I’d already managed to vacuum a lot of fluff out of the fan from the outside, I found there was still about half a hamster to clear out of the space between the fan and the heat sink.
Cloning the hard drive onto the SSD was a long and slightly stressful process considering my laptop’s previous crawling pace and the fact that it somehow went wrong somewhere along the line whilst it was left to its own devices, but a final look at about 4am suggested the second attempt had been successful.
The next step, taking the laptop apart, was nerve-wracking (considering I’d not attempted anything like it before) but all went smoothly after the surprisingly tricky first step of prising the keyboard off…
As I type I can actually hear the tapping of keys rather than most other sounds being drowned out by the fan screaming in protest. Bliss!
I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to do it without my expert in-house technical support, but very pleased with the results! Laptop lives on for another… year? Two years? Decade..? Here’s hoping!
It’s so important to me to save things from going to waste if at all possible, which for me usually just means making a choice to avoid buying new things whenever possible (luckily, avoiding spending money comes naturally to me anyway!)
After this very satisfying success, I’ll definitely be thinking even more carefully about things I can save rather than replace.
Welcoming Wildlife 
I’m actually quite impressed that you were even able to find parts to upgrade the laptop… I guess with an older one, it’s more likely that it was still built to even be maintainable or upgradeable. Not so much for modern ones, especially Macbooks. Notoriously unmaintainable, built to be waste… I wonder what my own laptop would be like in this regard.
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